1. Field
Example aspects of the present invention generally relate to data coding and decoding and, more particularly, to systems and methods for forward error correction (FEC) coding and decoding in multi-link and/or multi-networks.
2. Related Art
U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,012,159, 6,272,658, 6,336,200, 6,570,843, 6,609,223, and 7,024,609 and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/276,225, filed on Feb. 17, 2006, and Ser. No. 11/516,197, filed Sep. 6, 2006, each patent and application of which is incorporated herein by reference, describe methods for applying forward error correction (FEC) to protect streams of data from outages. These methods also allow a receiver to recover data which is lost in outages.
FEC encoding sometimes may introduce latency. For example, if FEC is applied to a time window of x seconds, then the receiver component may be required to buffer at least x seconds of data to perform error correction decoding on the data before it can be output to a player process.
In many applications, such as for the transmission of video, it is desirable to begin outputting data with as little delay as possible. For example, if the user is switching channels between different video streams, it is undesirable to require the user to wait for several seconds before viewing the new video stream.
The usefulness of the forward error correction methods described in, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,609,223 increases as the time window increases (that is, the FEC methods are able to recover from larger outages when the time window is larger). Therefore, it is also desirable to allow the time windows used to be large, for example, 30 seconds or more.